In what seems to be a direct response to AMD’s Radeon Vega Frontier edition, the latest 385.12 driver is helping NVIDIA to bring Quadro level performance and features on their Titan series. The driver is specifically meant to improve performance for creative professionals and pro workstation users. According to NVIDIA, the new drivers deliver 3x better performance in applications such as Maya which is a huge increase from the performance level we saw at launch.

The supported graphics cards are the new NVIDIA Titan series based on Pascal architecture. Only the NVIDIA Titan Xp was mentioned officially but it seems like even the older NVIDIA Titan X which uses Pascal architecture yields better results with the updated drivers. These drivers allow for external GPU chassis support on Titan cards which is great to hear. Users who want portability can now enjoy even faster graphics performance if they own an external GPU chassis.

TITAN Xp is the most powerful GPU you can put in your PC, and now we’re enabling even better performance with our latest TITAN drivers.

We built TITAN Xp for people who design and create — and, of course, play games. And it’s always getting better.

Our latest driver — available today — delivers 3x more performance in applications like Maya to help you create and design faster than ever.

You can now also use TITAN Xp with more PCs, including thin & light laptops, than ever before, and with external GPU chassis from a wide range of manufacturers including Asus, HP, Powercolor and Razer

And when you’re done if you want to rip through Battlefield 1 at 100 frames per second – no problem.

Best part: TITAN Xp is available worldwide. It’s available from Nvidia.com in United States, Europe, Australia, and Russia; from JD.com in China, PC Home in Taiwan, and from 11st in South Korea. via NVIDIA

We will tell you the performance of the new drivers in a bit but NVIDIA has also taken a direct aim at Vega on the blog site. The company states that after you’re done with the professional work, you can enjoy gaming in titles such as Battlefield 1 at 100 FPS without any problem. We can see that it is a direct response to AMD’s Radeon Vega Frontier Edition which ships with both pro and gaming mode with the latter being quite lackluster.

NVIDIA 385.12 Driver Performance on Titan X Graphics Card

A user on the NVIDIA subreddit has managed to compile the performance numbers of the driver on an NVIDIA Titan X against the NVIDIA Titan Xp and AMD Radeon Vega Frontier Edition. The GPU performance is compared in Specviewperf 12.1 which is the most popular application to evaluate pro workstation graphics horsepower across a multitude of tests. The performance gains are astonishing as we are looking at Quadro tier gains unshackled and ready to be harnessed by users.

The performance numbers show that the NVIDIA Titan X (new drivers) is faster than the NVIDIA Titan Xp (older drivers) and the AMD Radeon Vega Frontier Edition. The card launched last year and was replaced by the Titan Xp in 2017 but it shows that it can still perform much better than AMD’s latest Vega based offering.

NVIDIA 385.12 Driver Performance:

Benchmarks

NVIDIA Titan X (382.05)

NVIDIA Titan Xp

NVIDIA Titan X (385.12)

AMD Radeon Vega Frontier Edition

3dsmax

168.84

176.04

169.11

146.96

catia

102.06

102.06

175.81

128.51

creo

58.33

56.34

120.99

83.06

energy

12.89

13.39

19.91

18.77

maya

164.32

157.30

147.54

102.96

medical

54.62

62.78

83.39

87.01

showcase

153.91

167.86

141.56

113.88

snx

9.95

9

75.08

155.40

solidworks

52.01

61.84

101.42

106.75

NVIDIA Titan X (382.05) vs NVIDIA Titan X (385.12) Driver Gains:

Catia – 72% Increase

Creo – 107% Increase

Energy – 54% Increase

Medical – 53% Increase

SNX – 654% Increase

SolidWorks – 95% Increase

It’s a very competitive move by NVIDIA to bring this level on performance on cards that cost just $1200 US compared to Quadro solutions that end up for much higher. The Radeon Vega Frontier edition starts at $999 for the air and $1500 US for the liquid cooled variant and NVIDIA’s offering does look better if users want both great workstation and gaming performance, making it a true prosumer card. Users should note that Quadro cards will still carry a big advantage in certain apps as they have certified drivers made for them and will extend support in a variety of different pro workloads. The latest 385.12 driver can be downloaded from here.